Chatter

SHIFTING INTO GERE: Who says New Yorkers are jaded? When Richard Gere leaves his seventh-floor SoHo co-op, a neighbor phones a resident on the second floor and another "Richard Gere Drill" gets underway. Explains an insider: "They call the other people, and then anyone can go to the second floor apartment and watch him leave from the window, or they can run to the lobby." Surveillance is organized with different people in charge of monitoring different floors; some are assigned to comings, others to goings. When Gere isn't visible for a while, "we tell him he has a package, when he doesn't, and he goes to get it. He always falls for it." Despite their antics, Gere sounds like a model neighbor. When a bathmat was stolen from the laundry room, and its irate owner posted signs around the building asking for it back, a new note went up telling the person to go to Gere's apartment and "talk to my cleaning lady about money for a new bathmat." The actor was no thief, says a resident, "just tired of seeing the signs."

BOTTOMING OUT IN HOLLYWOOD: Judith Ivey, 35, who won a Tony after appearing naked on Broadway in Steaming, says she has found that her looks don't always measure up to Hollywood standards. Though she starred opposite Don Johnson in last season's miniseries The Long Hot Summer, she almost didn't get the part because she wasn't considered sexy enough. "Sexual to them is great big breasts that stand up, a teeny-tiny 14-year-old-boy's butt and a gorgeous face," Ivey griped to the Chicago Sun-Times. "The thing that's frustrating is that men get to be physically unattractive by stereotypical standards," she said, alluding to Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino, "and yet they can still be considered sexy on film. But if you're not a 'pretty' woman, you're not allowed to have sex with anybody."

SHE'S CONSONANTLY AT RISK: It may come as a surprise to her, but game show supernova Vanna White has a fan in brainy British actor Ben (Chariots of Fire) Cross. "I watch Wheel of Fortune two times a day," says Cross, who is in Miami filming The Unholy, a thriller. "When I come away from working on the film and I listen to Pat Sajak say, 'Oh, Vanna,' and there she is in that special dress, suddenly my world is back in order. Listen, I watched the show when she hurt her finger. It's a dangerous job, and she does it with unusual aplomb."

IT MAKES PERFECT SCENTS: After describing herself at a fund raiser in Tel Aviv as "a typical Jewish mother," giggly Goldie Hawn, mom to three children, discussed the depths of her devotion to her brood. "God, I'm here only a few days, but I really, really miss my 4-month-old baby, Wyatt," said Hawn. "When I left on this trip, I took his dirty undershirt with me, and in the hotel I stuck it under my pillow to smell my baby."

YOU CAN'T ALWAYS GET WHO YOU WANT: "I was more taken aback when Mick said I would be a good mother and we should have a baby than I had been when he...told me that he loved me," declares Marsha Hunt, mother of Mick Jagger's 16-year old daughter, Karis, in a new tell-most book, Real Life. Hunt, 40, who became more famous for her 1978 paternity suit against Jagger than as a singer-actress, says that Jagger's enthusiasm for parenthood abated in mid-pregnancy. "The notion of a baby became my total reality as it became Mick's passing fancy," says Hunt, who apparently carries no grudges. "He was already forgetting that the baby was his idea. He'd phone as if nothing had ever happened." Before Jagger agreed to pay support, Hunt found herself in an L.A. public assistance office with another problem. "I couldn't get any government assistance without supplying the name of my child's father so that someone could contact him about support payments," writes Hunt. "Imagine a West L.A. Social Security employee trying to get Mick Jagger on the telephone."